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The Theology of 
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) 
Expressed in Terms of Higher Dimensions

 Written November 17, 1998 

I quote selected sentences or paragraphs from this book and then make some comments with reference to the interpretation expressed by the author. This is certainly not an exhaustive treatment of Edwards' theology as Professor McClymond has done, but it might highlight some of the more prominent concepts of Edwards' theology. I first turn to the opening paragraphs of chapter 1 on page 9 of his book: 

One of the most contentious issues in the interpretation of Jonathan Edwards has been the nature and significance of his teaching on the "new sense," "spiritual sense," or "sense of the heart." 

At the heart of the debate lies a disagreement over whether the spiritual sense should be seen as basically continuous with, and integral to, the sphere of everyday sense experience, or as discontinuous with ordinary perception, and thus distinct and separate from it. 

Those who argue for discontinuity describe Edwards' spiritual sense as the apprehension of a mental content that is entirely different from the content of ordinary consciousness. Because Edwards in one notable passage in Religious Affections connects the spiritual sense with the Lockean notion of a "new simple idea," they hold that Edwards' position implies the existence of a sixth sense distinct from the usual mental faculties or channels of sense experience. Thus the spiritual sense has no direct link with the five faculties of seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling. It is not in any sense a modification or extension of everyday experience. Consequently, the presence or absence of the spiritual sense creates an epistemological cleavage between the regenerate and the unregenerate, who live in two altogether worlds. 

I take issue with those who argue for discontinuity. They say that Edwards' position implies the existence of a sixth sense, and I would agree with them on that point, but the so called sixth sense, in my opinion, does have a direct link with the five physical senses as described in the above quotation and in the experiences of everyday living. The five physical senses require a mind to interpret those senses either in emotions or actions that they stimulate. Before I attempt to argue this point, however, I must try to establish a concept that appears to be a reasonable relationship of the functioning brain-mind-spirit continuum. 

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1. THE BRAIN-MIND-SPIRIT

I think that everyone, or almost everyone, would agree that the human mind and spirit are integral parts of the physical human being, but where is the spirit, where is the mind? The glib answer is that the human spirit and mind are within our physical being, but are they? Neuroscience, psychology and philosophy have been searching for the location of the human mind in the brain, but to my understanding they have not found it there in spite of the most advanced instruments to photograph the brain in action such as the equipment for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). 

Professor Daniel L. Schacter of Harvard University is one of the leading scientists at the present time doing research on the memory of experiences. He says in the introduction to his 1996 book Searching for Memory, "It is now clear that we do not store judgment-free snapshots of our past experiences but rather hold on to the meaning, sense, and emotions these experiences provided us." 

Professor Schacter also said, "We have now come to believe that memory is not a single or unitary facility of the mind, as was long assumed. Instead, it is composed of a variety of distinct and dis-sociable processes and systems. Each system depends on a particular constellation of networks in the brain that involve different neural structures, each of which plays a highly specialized role within the system." These quotations have been taken from his book in reverse order, first to link experiences with emotions, and second, to describe the brain processes associated with recalling experiences. In this second quotation, Professor Schacter seems to be saying that the mind is the brain and the brain is the mind, it being one and the same thing. My conversations with Professor Henry L. Roediger, III, Chairman of the Psychology Department of Washington University in St. Louis informs me that research in the memory of experiences has not, at least as yet, gone beyond the study of the brain through the use of such instruments as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). 

I think that such research will eventually go further when it has reached the limits of brain research and may be forced to say that the mind functions outside of the brain, and that the brain activity is merely the "mechanical" functions that can be observed through instrumental research. Indeed, the physical brain is probably much greater than the portion of the accessible to research because of the passage of time. Yesterday's brain is in past-time. We cannot recover past-time, but possibly the experiences of yesterday are stored in that portion of the four-dimensional brain that is unavailable to the MRI for research. Hence, the mechanical research that is currently being dome in searching for memory may ultimately prove to be inadequate to locate the memory, and indeed, to locate the mind. 

As long ago as 1986, Dr. Robert J. White, Professor of Surgery and Co-Chairman of Neurosurgery at Case Western Reserve University Medical School, and Director of Neurological Surgery and The Brain Research Laboratories MetroHealth Medical Center, Cleveland, Ohio, said in a paper presented to ITEST, "we may require an entirely new, as yet undescribed methodology, which lies beyond quantum mechanics and molecular biology -a '5th' dimensional concept, so radical, so advanced, so different that even its faintest outline has yet to appear." I agree with Dr. White, the mind may function in the fifth dimension, transcendent to the brain in the 4th dimension and therefore has access to the memory stored in the brain at the time of the experience which is now the major portion of the brain in spacetime. Memory may need to be recalled occasionally to be restored in our current mind. Many past experiences may be so minor to our lives that they are not recalled and eventually they are lost beyond recall. That might be the early stages of Alzheimer's disease that operates in all human persons. As a person becomes older, Alzheimer's likely reflects more and more recent stages of our brain in past-time. A common complaint of older persons is forgetting the names of people and places, even of our close friends. It is only when Alzheimer's disease catches up to more recent times past or even into the current moment of time that we say that a person is stricken with Alzheimer's disease. 

It is my opinion that the mind could be located in the fifth dimension of space and functions transcendentally to the brain in the fourth dimension that has been given the name of spacetime. We are living from moment to moment in time and the human physical body, including the brain, is likely not destroyed as it passes into past-time but remains as a four-dimensional object that has been growing from the date of one's conception in his or her mother's womb. This concept is supported by string-theory in physics, but I think that physicists have a misconception of the fifth and higher dimensions as they try to explain this theory. I have written previous papers on this subject; therefore I will not in this paper try to repeat my arguments in favor of the progression of curved spacetime into the higher dimensions which reach their maximum "area" at the seventh dimension and then trail off asymptotically to about the twenty-sixth dimension. 

The functioning of the mind requires memory.  We base almost all of our actions on some aspect of memory. Some of our actions may not require memory as we might attempt to do something that we have never done, and usually those actions are failing actions--we might miss the golf ball completely the first time we try to hit it with a golf club. On the second try, we remember our failure and what might have caused it, and try to improve our swing. But how does memory work? The memory in our brain of that first failure has past into past-time when we try our second attempt, and how is that memory brought from past-time to the present moment? It is, of course, through the functioning of our mind, but that requires something similar to a bridge. 

To clarify what I am attempting to say, let us reduce the fourth dimension of spacetime to the second dimension, a flat surface. On this flat surface, let us draw an arrow pointing toward the right. This is the arrow of time signifying that time is constantly moving toward the right. We place a pawn used in the game of chess over the arrow. The contact of the base of the pawn representing our first golf failure. We now in the passage of time try our second golf attempt. Make a dot to the right of the pawn representing the time of our second attempt, but how do we remember what we did to produce the first failure. Now we are three-dimensional people, transcendent to the two-dimensional world on which the arrow of time was drawn. Being transcendent to the two-dimensional world, we can lift the pawn and place the base on the dot in time representing our second attempt, and that memory can then be re-lived and suggest how we should change our swing to do better. We are then the bridge lifting past memory transcendentally to the present time. 

Now let us go back to our "real" world of three dimensions and we are trying to learn how to play golf. Our first failure has moved into past-time of the fourth dimension or of spacetime. It may require a transcendent action to lift that past experience into the present moment to teach us how to improve our swing. That transcendent action might be the action of our mind, recalling memory and transporting it into the present moment and a certain location lights up in our brain as seen by the MRI instrument. 

Memory, it seems, can also be altered by the mind as it moves across the so called bridge of the mind so that we remember past experiences as being more favorable to us or to prove a stance that we have taken. This would appear to be possible if the mind was transcendent in a higher dimension to the brain. A higher dimension can act upon a lower dimension in what might appear to be a mysterious way. For example, a three-dimensional person, such as we are, can take a two-dimensional object from the surface of a table, turn it over so that it is the reverse of the object seen by the two-dimensional world and replace it upon the table. To a two-dimensional "person" living on the surface of that table, that would be a mystery or miracle beyond comprehension, but a three-dimensional person can understand that miracle perfectly. 

I think that neuroscience will eventually come to recognize its limitations if it continues to confine its research to the current three-dimensional world, which is merely a cross-section of the four-dimensional world of spacetime, and the need for the mind to be transcendent in the fifth dimension to the four-dimensional brain. 

Biblical and theological study and research would appear to support the concept of a fifth dimensional mind and even a sixth-dimensional spirit, transcendent to the mind and having some control over the mind, just as the transcendent mind may have control over the four-dimensional brain. I will not define the details of this concept of the spirit in this paper because I have done this in previous papers that I have written, especially a rather short paper dated May 27, 1997. Nevertheless, that the concept that the human spirit may function in the sixth dimension, transcendent to the mind in the fifth dimension, appears to address the concept of the human spirit in the theology of Jonathan Edwards. 

But what of the human spirit? This is something that humans have that animals do not seem to have, or if they do it is rather feeble and usually ineffective. Indeed, God may have created man by adding a spirit in the sixth dimension to the animal progenitor of man that had a functioning mind in the fifth dimension as described above, an ape if you will, or the Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal "man." This adding of a spirit might have occurred rather recently in the lifetime of the universe, maybe as recently as nine to twelve thousand years ago. The beginning of human consciousness might have been when the animal-man received a God-given spirit. Professor Julian Jaynes of Princeton University suggests in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that human consciousness could have begun 7,000 to 10,000 years B.C. He says that the evidence of such consciousness is the archaeological findings of the burial of leaders in a sitting position as though they were still alive and ruling. He also suggests that the cuneiform writing of the fourth millennium B.C. was the first written expression of human consciousness. 

This God-given spirit could function in the sixth dimension, being transcendent to the mind in the fifth dimension. I suggest that this might be true because if a person learns the art of love (deep love or agape love) the result may be the growth of the spirit. Furthermore, we see the evidence of such a person acting in a manner of love toward other persons in what appears to be almost automatic action. How could this occur unless the spirit of that person is transcendent to the mind of that person, thereby dominating the mind of that person. Such domination would suggest that the human spirit exists and functions in the sixth dimension transcendent to the functioning mind in the fifth dimension. There are no instruments available to measure the mind or the spirit of a person, to say nothing of seeing the physical actions of the mind or the spirit because, in the wisdom of God, we are locked in the three-dimensional cross section of the spacetime continuum in the fourth dimension. We cannot see or measure anything beyond our three-dimensional world. On the other hand, we can see and measure the possible resulting actions of the spirit and the mind of one person to another person in our current moment of time. 

But what of the person who does not want to learn the art of deep or agape love toward other persons. That person refuses to partake, or only dabbles with the nourishment, of the Water and Bread of Life freely offered by God to every person under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit. Such a person begins to wither in the spirit and that spirit becomes less and less dominant over the mind. The mind of such a person, therefore, acts more and more in an animal fashion--the survival of the fittest. That is, such a person thinks first and foremost of himself or herself. They seem to feel that they can and should take good care of themselves even at the expense of other persons. We have all seen such characters, and we ourselves often act in such a manner, thereby withering a bit, or shrinking, in the spirit. We and they act in a spirit of violence toward other persons--not necessarily engaging in physical violence toward them but acting in mental violence or mental cruelty. 

We have all sinned and have come short of the glory of God. It is only if we learn the art of love under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit more often than when we become our own god and depend solely upon ourselves to live unto ourselves, that we have the hope of a net growth of the spirit leading to everlasting life in heaven surrounded by the infinite Love of God. 

It is this relationship, this linkage, of the spirit to the mind that supports the concept that the theology and teaching of Jonathan Edwards has a "new sense," "spiritual sense," or "sense of the heart." This spiritual sense is, I would argue, not different from the content of ordinary consciousness. This sixth sense mingles with the so called usual mental faculties of seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling, our channels of sense experience. Therefore, there appears to be a sound rationale to argue for continuity of the spiritual sense to events in the daily experience of living rather than a discontinuity as some persons are reported to believe by Michael McClymond. 

I have dwelt at some length on this first quotation in Professor McClymond's book for two reasons. The first is that I desired to set forth the concept of the theology of the spirit as expressed in higher dimensions rather fully as it pertains to this first quotation. The second reason, and the more important of the two, is the opening sentence in the first quotation which stated that the "new sense," "spiritual sense," or "sense of the heart" was one of the most contentious issues in the interpretation of Jonathan Edwards' theology. 

Now, let us go to a second quotation found on page 13: 

[Conrad] Cherry focused attention on Edwards' doctrine of divine illumination and his teaching that the spiritual sense only becomes possible through the inner enablement of the Holy Spirit. Devoting an entire chapter to the Holy Spirit as "the internal possibility of the act" of faith, Cherry showed in effect, that Edwards' notion of spiritual perception is not dyadic but triadic. That is, this form of perception is unique in involving not only a perceiving subject and a perceiving object, but also a "divine light" or "communication of the Spirit." A special enablement or empowerment, conferred through the agency of the Holy Spirit, is an indispensable requirement for any human perception of God and spiritual things. 

The most difficult issue of all, as Cherry acknowledged, was "the rather thorny problem...of how the Divine Light is related to the human seeing. Edwards repeatedly states that the divine light does not merely shine upon the minds of the elect but is communicated to them, and enters into them, in such a way that it becomes an "indwelling principle" that enables their natural faculties to operate in a new unprecedented fashion. The Spirit pervades the saint's mind. Yet Edwards does not wish to portray the connection of the divine light and the human vision as so intimate that the light mystically absorbed into human nature, or the human nature into the divine light... A distinction between God and humanity remains at all times, even though the Spirit and  the natural human faculties operate conjointly and coordinately in the process of spiritual perception. 

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2. SPIRITUAL FOOD

The Very Reverend Professor Thomas F. Torrance in a relatively recent address spoke of the difference between created and uncreated light. The former being the light of the sun and the other myriad of stars in the universe, and the latter being the Light of God himself. I think that Professor Torrance did not agree with me, at least fully agree, but I responded in an expression of full accord with his view of this distinction. The light of God is revealed to the three-dimensional world by the Holy Spirit manifesting herself (and I use the feminine pronoun here because I speak later in this paper of the "womb" of the Holy Spirit.) in the form of light being the only manner that a being in the sixth dimension can come into the three-dimensional world. A being in the fourth dimension can come into three dimensions as the resurrected Christ did on several occasions recorded in the Gospels. The Holy Spirit of God, God's sixth dimension, can only be revealed in the form of light as seen in the Pillar of Fire and Cloud leading the Hebrews out of Egypt and through their wilderness wanderings, the Shekinah Light between the cherubim over the Ark of the Covenant, the Star of Bethlehem and the Tongues of Fire on the Day of Pentecost, to name only a few such appearances of the Holy Spirit. This uncreated light of the Holy Spirit, however, in my opinion, does not lead to human "seeing." Human "seeing" seems to be more reasonable related to the growth of the human spirit and that requires nourishment and not the uncreated Light of the Holy Spirit. The question is, What constitutes the nourishment for the human spirit? 

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2.1 HISTORY -- GOD/MAN 

Leaving this concept of the un-created Light of the Holy Spirit for a moment, turn with me to consider God's relationship with man from the time that he first created man possibly by adding a spirit in the sixth dimension to the five-dimensional mind of the animal-man to give man a conscience and also giving man the freedom to break away from God if man so chooses. Man, from the very beginning chose to be on his own and to have no dependence upon God his creator. A man, in assembly with other men, often has more nerve to act than as a lone individual. That was God's experience with his creation of human beings; when human beings began to multiply, they broke away from him en-masse. 

Until God created man with the freedom to choose between God and themselves, God's creation was "very good." Indeed, it was and is most wonderful--awesome. The creation of man, on the other hand, was probably an experiment of God. It apparently was the first of God's creation wherein he relinquished full control, possibly thinking if he gave man the freedom to choose, and if man chose to seek God that would have been the best creation of all. Man, however, chose to be his own god. God's experiment was failing for the first time. 

God caused the great flood, probably the collapse of the envelope of ice particles surrounding the earth by the tail of a comet or a huge meteorite. He tried again to build a human race which would choose to depend upon God, but with the same result. They broke away. 

God appears to have decided to narrow the field. Instead of the hole human population, he called Abram and from him and Sarah, God would create a chosen nation. After slavery in Egypt, Moses, under God's direction led the Hebrews out of Egypt, but soon thereafter when at Mount Sinai, they casted a golden calf and began worshipping that idol rather than God. They finally entered the promised land but following the reign of their kings David and Solomon, the nation split with the larger part, Israel, and the smaller part, Judah. The smaller part did worship God under the reign of several of their kings, but the larger part, Israel, fled from God under all of their kings. Hence, God allowed the Assyrian army to disseminate the kingdom of Israel. God narrowed the field again. 

God's only remaining chosen nation was Judah for a relatively short time and they broke away from God. The Babylonian captivity ensued. After about seventy years only a remnant of the Hebrew captives came back to Jerusalem. Even such a small nation, however, continued breaking away from God. God determined that he would narrow the field completely, to each individual person. This was probably the cause for the Incarnation leading toward the Crucifixion. 

I have described my thoughts concerning the Incarnation and the doctrines of Christology in my paper God is One as directed to the biological questions raised by Arthur Peacocke in his book From DNA to DEAN. Hence, I direct the reader to that paper on this website. 

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2.2 RETURNING TO SPIRITUAL FOOD

I have also written previous papers concerning the probability that at the last moments on the cross, Christ opened the "womb" of the Holy Spirit. His human spirit, had probably been joined to the Holy Spirit at the time of his baptism. Now, after hours of hanging on the cross and suffering the humiliation and extreme pain, he became the most human of any time in his earthly life. The "weld" of his human spirit to the Holy Spirit, which had held firm in his temptation in the wilderness, broke, "My God my God why hast thou forsaken me?" And, the curtain which had signified the separation of God and man, was torn from top to bottom. It was probably this wound in the Holy Spirit--God the Father suffered also in those final moments of Jesus on the cross--that opened the Holy Spirit to every person living at that time and forever afterward. 

I call this wound or opening in the Holy Spirit the opening of the "womb" of the Holy Spirit, because Jesus said to Nicodemus, "...unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God." And again, "..unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh [three-dimensional] is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit [six-dimensional]." 

During the whole of one's earthly life, everyone may be in the womb of the Holy Spirit and nourished in the spirit as a mother nourishes her infant until birth through the umbilical cord. The primary differences being that the womb of the Holy Spirit is a six-dimensional womb as compared with the three-dimensional womb of the human mother. Also, being in the womb of the Holy Spirit, human beings have the God-given freedom to put a kink in that six-dimensional umbilical cord and refuse to accept the nourishment of the Water and Bread of Life from the Holy Spirit, and that spirit withers. On the other hand, by accepting the Water and Bread of Life by learning the art of loving other human beings under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit, nourishes the spirit and causes it to grow. The theory of evolution developed by Darwin calls for the survival of the fittest among animals, and in human beings this survival could be at the expense of other human beings when the human spirit does not transcend and control the mind. 

As the human spirit grows in love it could have, and possibly does have, increasing dominance over the mind. Thereby the dominance of love in one's spirit will cause that person to act more and more automatically in love to his or her fellow human beings, and indeed to animals, or some animals, as well. On the other hand, if a person refuses or accepts only a bit of nourishment from the Holy Spirit, that person's spirit may wither and become less and less dominant over the mind. Under this circumstance, love will give way to violence toward other persons for self preservation or more probably self aggrandizement, either in physical violence or the more insidious mental violence. 

Thus, it is in Edwards "communication of the Spirit" through the six-dimensional umbilical cord to each individual person, that "a special enablement or empowerment, [is] conferred through the agency of the Holy Spirit, [and] is an indispensable requirement for any human perception of God and spiritual things." 

Let us now go to another quotation from Professor McClymond's book, page 31: 

The whole intent of Edwards' ontology is not to minimize or obliterate the distinction between God and the world in pantheistic fashion, but rather to enforce and accentuate this distinction. Surprising as it seems today, given the repudiation of metaphysics by many twentieth-century theologians, Edwards' identification of God as "Being in general" is designed chiefly to highlight the utter uniqueness and incommensurability of God. Precisely because of God's own infinite Being, God transcends creatures that exist only in partial and particular ways. Ontology is a safeguard for divine transcendence and most certainly not a means of reducing God to creaturely dimensions, or knocking God down to our size. The theocentric tendency of Edwards' ontology is perhaps most tellingly conveyed in a passage in End of Creation, where he suggests the thought experiment of weighing God and the world in opposite pans of a vast balance. The conclusion, as one might expect, is that "as the Creator is infinite, and has all possible existence, perfection and excellence, so he must have all possible regard." Ontology serves doxology. The analogy of the balance illustrates graphically the process that is constantly occurring in Edwards' writings; the weighing of God's being and reality over against that of the world. 

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3. THE REALITY OF GOD 

In my paper entitled God is One, I have tried to describe the lower dimensions of God and the higher dimensions of man (Sections 7 and 5 respectively). These dimensions coincide and that is the reason that it can be said that man was created in the image of God. We are the image of God but we are not God because God transcends the highest dimension of the spirit of man in the sixth dimension by existing not only in those six dimensions but also existing in the seventh dimension; that is God the Father. I refer you to Section 4 of my paper God is One which describes the surface area of a unit sphere calculated from zero dimensions (the singularity of the big-bang) to an infinite number of dimensions, reaches its greatest surface area at the seventh dimension and then tapers off asymptotically to almost zero at around the twenty-sixth dimension. The mathematical proof is also presented that the volume of a unit sphere reached its maximum at the fifth dimension, but Einstein, in his theories of relativity, speaks of the curvature of the spacetime continuum as though it is the surface of a sphere. It is the surface of that time sphere that began at time=0 with God's creation of the cosmos and has probably been expanding in increments of the Planck constant ever since.  I especially call your attention to the graph showing the surface area as well as the volume of a unit sphere as it computer progressively through the increasing dimensions.

Any object of a given dimension has all of the lower dimensions contained in it. If my above reasoning about the mind, being and functioning in the fifth dimension, transcendent to the brain in the fourth dimension of spacetime, and the spirit being in the sixth dimension transcendent to the mind in the fifth dimension, is reasonable, God has all of these dimensions because we were created in his image. But, God is infinitely greater than man can ever become because God also may, and probably does, exist in the seventh dimension, the largest surface dimension that can be obtained mathematically. 

How about the lowest dimensions of God? Does God have a physical body such as we have? My answer is an emphatic "Yes!" It is the person of Melchizedek, king of Salem, or king of Peace, spoken of in the 14th chapter of Genesis as he ministered to Abram following the rescue of his nephew Lot. Melchizedek is mentioned in only one other place in the Old Testament--Psalm 110--but he forms the basis for the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament. Nevertheless, in the book of Numbers is the account of Aaron and Miriam becoming disgruntled and complaining to God that he appears to favor Moses above them, and God called the three of them to the tent of meeting as told in the 12th chapter. God appeared to them in a pillar of cloud (the Holy Spirit of God) and said: 

If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord make myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses; he is entrusted with all my house. With him I speak mouth to mouth, clearly, and not in dark speech; and he beholds the form of the Lord. 

That form is the physical person of Melchizedek. At such times that God speaks with Moses, he could come into our three-dimensional world as the resurrected Jesus Christ came into our three-dimensional world as told in the Gospel accounts. Hence, God does have a physical body and Melchizedek is his name as shown in the 7th chapter of Hebrews: 

For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the most high God, met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him; and to him Abraham apportioned a tenth part of everything. He is first, by translation of his name, king of righteousness, and then he is also king of Salem, that is, king of peace. He is without father or mother or genealogy, and has neither beginning of days nor end of life, but resembling the Son of God he continues a priest forever. 

Who could this be but God himself. God does have the lower three dimensions in which he can enter our three-dimensional world whenever he wishes to do so. Melchizedek resembles Jesus Christ, the Son of God, but is not the same as Jesus Christ. He had only the DNA of God, but Jesus Christ had the DNA of God because it must have been Melchizedek who came upon Mary so that she could conceive and give birth to a male child who would be holy. And, Jesus also had the DNA of Mary, a human DNA. It was this DNA combination that made Jesus both human and divine, and permitted Jesus to become the Christ at his baptism when his spirit was "welded" to the Holy Spirit, and the DNA of Mary permitted Christ to become the most human at the last moments on the cross when he broke from the Holy Spirit to open the "womb" of the Holy Spirit and become our Saviour. 

Hence, this concept of higher and lower dimensions seems to focus upon the reality of God. God is probably a six-dimensional being just as we are, plus, and the plus is most important, God in the seventh dimension is infinitely greater than man can ever become and even greater than Jesus Christ during his public ministry on earth when his spirit was one with the Holy Spirit. This is why Jesus is recorded in the 24th chapter of Matthew as saying, "But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven nor the Son, but the Father only." During his earthly ministry, Jesus was God only through the dimension of the Holy Spirit, and why in the Garden of Gethsemane he prayed fervently to his Father as he approached the reality, humility and torture of the cross. 

This concept puts flesh and blood on Edwards' ontology, and ties in with the following quotation from McClymond's book, page 59: 

Edwards' anthropomorphizing of God owes much to Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, inasmuch as End of Creation portrays God psychologically. The text is studded with such words as "appetite," "gratify," and "desire," and in his introduction he identifies an agent's "last end" with "an immediate gratification of any appetite or inclination of nature." It is not only that God has purposes to accomplish through various actions, but also that God may fittingly be spoken of, in very human terms, as "gratified" and "pleased" in the accomplishment of these purposes. 

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4. EDWARDS' HOPE 

Then skipping over to the last chapter of the book Edwards is said to envisage the link between theology and science, and even the arts, page 101-102: 

An intriguing expression of the implicit apology occurs in a short philosophical paper Edwards wrote entitled A Rational Account of the Main Doctrines of the Christian Religion Attempted. Though it is merely a set of short, cryptic notes and occupies but a single folio sheet, it outlines an extensive and ambitious undertaking. The watermark on the paper indicates a date of 1729-30, yet the handwriting and ink of the final jottings derive from the later 1730s or the 1740s. Wallace Anderson concludes that this single sheet gives evidence that the notion of a Rational Account preoccupied Edwards for some fifteen years. In his projected preface to the work, Edwards was "to show how all arts and sciences, the more they are perfected, the more they  issue in divinity, and coincide with it, and appear to be as part of it." What he envisaged was nothing less than a comprehensive system of the sciences with theology as queen of them all. Probably no religious thinker of the modern age--with the possible exception of Hegel--seriously attempted such a thing. One is tempted to think of this Rational Account as "medieval," except that Edwards' system would assuredly have embodied the empirical and post-Lockean principles that one finds throughout his oeuvre. While Edwards did not live to author such a Rational Account, his published works in various ways reflect an effort to bring the arts and sciences into relation with God. 

If Edwards were living at the present time he might probably have accepted the concept of theology expressed in higher dimensions with open arms. His theology seems to fit this concept very well. He might have been the leading advocate of integrating natural science and theology. 

There are many more things that I could discuss in this paper about the theology of Jonathan Edwards, but I think I have said enough to present the flavor of his theology expressed in higher dimensions. 

© William Witherspoon - 2004

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